Issue 02
Every other Tuesday, the ClearMatch agent reports what it saw in the Cleared GovCon job market: total volume, who's hiring, what skills are in demand, where the work sits. Anonymized aggregate intelligence built from the same daily scan the agent runs for every Cleared candidate on the platform. No promotional fluff.
Issue 01 tracked just under 10,000 Cleared roles across 124 employer career pages. This fortnight: 10,333 across 128 — the agent's coverage grew, and the market moved underneath it. More on both below.
// Scan Volume
In the last 14 days, the agent scanned 46,282 GovCon contractor postings across 128 vetted employer careers pages.
Of those, 10,333 explicitly required Secret-or-above clearance. Roles surfaced to cleared candidates after scoring: 1,389.
// Clearance Mix
Of the 10,333 cleared roles:
| Tier | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Secret | 5,359 | 51.9% |
| TS | 1,457 | 14.1% |
| TS/SCI | 1,839 | 17.8% |
| TS/SCI + CI Poly | 310 | 3.0% |
| TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly | 1,368 | 13.2% |
Secret is just over half the Cleared market (51.9%) — the commodity tier. The standout remains the top of the stack: TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly at 13.2% (1,368 roles), the continuous IC mission-systems demand, plus another 3% at TS/SCI + CI Poly. TS/SCI proper climbed to 17.8%. Roughly one in three Cleared roles this fortnight sits at TS/SCI or above.
Confidential-tier roles excluded from totals above (17 in window — functionally rare in modern GovCon).
// Top Hiring Contractors
GovCon employers with the most cleared (Secret+) postings:
| # | Contractor | Cleared | Most common tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lockheed Martin | 1,610 | Secret |
| 2 | GDIT (General Dynamics IT) | 583 | TS/SCI + FSP |
| 3 | CACI | 550 | TS/SCI + FSP |
| 4 | RTX (Raytheon / Collins / Pratt & Whitney) | 497 | Secret |
| 5 | L3Harris | 494 | Secret |
| 6 | Peraton | 441 | Secret |
| 7 | Booz Allen Hamilton | 426 | Secret |
| 8 | Anduril Industries | 386 | Secret |
| 9 | Accenture Federal Services | 381 | TS/SCI |
| 10 | Amentum | 283 | Secret |
Lockheed Martin tops the list at 1,610 Cleared roles — about 16% of the entire Cleared market this fortnight on its own. The top 10 contractors together account for roughly 55% of all Cleared demand: the Cleared market is concentrated, and these are the names a candidate's agent is matching against most often.
One signal worth flagging: GDIT and CACI both show TS/SCI + Full Scope Poly as their most common Cleared tier — their hiring skews unusually high up the clearance stack, not the Secret-heavy mix of the defense industrials. Booz Allen Hamilton re-enters the top 10. Anduril holds at #8, the defense-tech entrant among primes that have been hiring Cleared for decades.
Coverage expanded to 128 employer career pages this fortnight, up from 124 in Issue 01 — new sources added since the last issue include the Institute for Defense Analyses, Three Saints Bay, and Chemonics International. Part of this issue's higher volume is that expanded coverage; part is real movement in what existing employers are posting.
A handful of major primes aren't in the scan yet, and we're steadily adding more sources each issue — so the true Cleared market is somewhat larger than the numbers here.
// Geographic Concentration
Where the cleared roles are based:
| Region | Cleared roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
| DC Metro | 2,635 | 34.7% |
| Los Angeles Metro | 409 | 5.4% |
| Huntsville | 245 | 3.2% |
| Tampa | 228 | 3.0% |
| Massachusetts | 221 | 2.9% |
| Tucson | 142 | 1.9% |
| Overseas | 143 | 1.9% |
| Remote-eligible | 137 | 1.8% |
| Denver Metro | 84 | 1.1% |
| Colorado Springs | 87 | 1.1% |
| San Antonio | 51 | 0.7% |
| Hawaii / INDOPACOM | 55 | 0.7% |
| St. Louis | 46 | 0.6% |
| Augusta | 27 | 0.4% |
| Other (distributed) | 3,081 | 40.6% |
DC Metro leads at 34.7%, as expected. Beyond it: Los Angeles Metro at 5.4% (the SoCal aerospace cluster — Anduril, Northrop, Lockheed), Huntsville at 3.2% (Redstone / missile defense, up this fortnight), Tampa at 3% (CENTCOM/SOCOM), and Overseas at 1.9% (Germany, UK, and scattered elsewhere — Cleared work is more globally distributed than the DC-only view suggests).
The 40.6% "Other" is the defense industrial base outside the named hubs — Fort Worth, Marietta, Melbourne, Manchester, Orlando. No single site dominates; collectively they're a large share of where Cleared work actually happens.
Locations are drawn from the postings themselves where available. About a quarter of Cleared roles this fortnight carried no structured location and are excluded from the regional breakdown; that share shrinks as our coverage improves.
// Top Skills In Demand
Most frequently required across the cleared role pool:
| # | Skill | Cleared roles requiring |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Python | 1,260 |
| 2 | AWS | 704 |
| 3 | C++ | 631 |
| 4 | Docker | 438 |
| 5 | Kubernetes | 425 |
Python is the most-required skill by a wide margin (1,260 Cleared roles) — every clearance tier wants it. C++ at #3 is the defense-industrial tell: Lockheed, RTX, and L3Harris run heavy C++ shops for mission systems and avionics. Docker and Kubernetes together signal the ongoing DoD modernization push on the Cleared side.
Skill demand is measured across a set of in-demand GovCon skills we track, refreshed each quarter as the market shifts.
// Adjacent Market: Public Trust
Public Trust isn’t a security clearance — it’s the federal suitability tier for civilian fed work (CISA, IRS, VA, USDA, HHS) handling sensitive-but-unclassified information. Included separately because many cleared candidates dual-purpose this pool between cleared engagements, and the demand signal is its own market.
In the last 14 days: 633 Public Trust-eligible postings.
Top hiring contractors
| Contractor | Count |
|---|---|
| Guidehouse | 88 |
| ICF International | 75 |
| CACI | 67 |
| GDIT (General Dynamics IT) | 67 |
| Leidos | 43 |
| KACE Company | 39 |
| Amentum | 36 |
| Accenture Federal Services | 30 |
| L3Harris | 28 |
| Peraton | 21 |
Top regions
| Region | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Other (distributed) | 287 | 45.3% |
| DC Metro | 192 | 30.3% |
| Remote-eligible | 74 | 11.7% |
| Los Angeles Metro | 4 | 0.6% |
| Massachusetts | 2 | 0.3% |
| Tucson | 2 | 0.3% |
| San Antonio | 2 | 0.3% |
| Hawaii / INDOPACOM | 2 | 0.3% |
| Denver Metro | 1 | 0.2% |
| Huntsville | 1 | 0.2% |
| Overseas | 1 | 0.2% |
Public Trust volume held steady at 633 roles. Guidehouse and ICF International continue to lead — civilian-fed transformation work — with CACI and GDIT close behind. Public Trust skews more remote-friendly than Cleared work: different security posture, fewer SCIF dependencies.
Public Trust counts reflect JD postings that explicitly name "Public Trust," "MBI," or "Tier 1/2/4." Many civilian fed contractor roles are PT-eligible in practice but don't use that language in the listing — the agency runs the suitability investigation post-hire. Actual PT-eligible volume is materially higher than the explicit count shown here.